Having three different machines running Mac OS X, Fedora F8 Linux, and
Windows XP, respectively, really gives one a ``three-ring circus''
experience. It's sometimes confusing to operate one display, two
keyboards, and three mice. Also, the Mac OS X environment includes a
virtual Windows environment, as well as typically several X windows
connected to my Linux machine (using xhost and ssh
-X). I really like VMware's ``unity'' mode in which Windows
applications share the same desktop as Mac apps. (In that case, the
Windows apps may be launched from a VMware menu.) I can almost
drive everything from the Mac.

Related to the previous point, one thing that annoys me very much in
emacs on Linux is that one must be very careful to press modifier keys
such as meta and shift in the right order. This issue disappears when
driving from the Mac. The issue appeared relatively recently in
Linux, perhaps somewhere around Fedora 6.

Misc. Remarks:

On the Macbook Pro, I miss the ``page up'' and ``page down''
keys for scrolling up or down by one screenful. Often <fn>
<up/down arrow> works, or sometimes <command> <arrow>, but
neither works reliably across all applications. Regression!

Instead of upgrading my Belkin OmniView switcher, I'm connecting
the Mac Pro directly to the digital input of my Dell monitor. The
Belkin drives the monitor's analog input from either the Linux or
Windows machine. At some point I may get an all-digital (DVI-D)
video switcher. It might only need to be two-way if I can
ultimately retire my ailing Windows machine. If I can get
comfortable driving everything from the Mac, I won't need it at all.

I originally planned to start running the Mac version of
Quicken, but after reading comments on the Web, I decided I was
better off running the Windows version of Quicken in my VMware
virtual Windows machine. Since Quicken flows into Turbotax, I
probably want to keep using the Windows version of that as well.

I also planned to run Eudora natively, but this was not easy to set up.4I'm therefore running Eudora in virtual Windows on the Mac, and this
is so far working out great.

Sound did not work in VMware Fusion at first. I thought
sound was ok on the Mac because it played a boot-up sound on the
internal speaker, and pd-extended's audio checker (via portaudio)
was working fine. After at least an hour of fooling around, I
finally determined that the failure was due to the default output on
the Mac Pro being the digital output. (See ``Applications /
System Preferences / Sound / Output''.) You have to select exactly
one of ``digital out'', ``line out'', or ``headphones out''. It
seems completely unbelievable that one cannot have more than one
sound output connector operating at a time, especially line out and
headphones out for Pete's sake! Is Apple trying to save a few cents
on an audio output signal buffer in a $3K system? This makes no
sense to me at all.
Well, I'll be using the digital output soon enough, so I'm going to
try to forget about analog audio (non)support on the Mac Pro. On
second thought, perhaps it's just software senility: portaudio
evidently ignores this setting and drives all the audio outputs
(though I've only checked the headphone out at this point from Pd).
I am always amazed by how many switches there are in the sound path
that can result in ``no sound''.

Attempting to burn a CD-R audio disk from Windows Media Player
11 within VMware just hanged forever waiting for a blank CD to be
inserted. The disk was later declared ``not blank'' by iTunes --
another disk for the coaster collection.

Compiling a large LaTeX book in PDF took 25 seconds on the Mac
Pro and half a second longer on my quad-core Linux system, according
to the command ``time make pdf > /dev/null''. The Mac quad-cores
are running at 2.8 GHz with 2GB of memory while the Linux quad-cores
are at 2.4 GHz with 4GB of memory. The disks should be about the
same. The ps2pdf utility seems slower than it should be
(single-threaded?).

While it is slightly slower, I presently prefer my Linux box for
book development because of its more ergonomic keyboard. I also
find xpdf easier to use than Preview when checking PDFs.
Preview has the significant advantage of being able to ``crop all
pages'' within the inspector (according to a current text selection
using the ``select tool''), but I haven't found a way to crop
automatically in the Makefile (possibly Automator can do it, but
I'll have to spend some time learning about that -- it did not work
to guess my way through its UI). Also, embedded hyperlinks in the
PDF work from xpdf but not Preview, as far as I can tell.

I was impressed to see that latex2html worked as well as it did
right out of the box (as installed by port).

The first snag I hit compiling my books on the Mac Pro was the
absence of the file fancyheadings.sty, which was not
contained in texlive.
For now, I've added fancyheadings.sty to my svn repo for
the books, and I've found no further problems (to my amazement).

The second snag compiling my books was that latex2html
creates a file index.html that is a hard link to
[book-name].html, and it also creates Index.html
for the Index section of the book (you know--a normal index). The
problem is of course that the Mac OS X filesystem is
case-insensitive by default, so the book index is lost in the HTML
version. One solution is to compile HTML versions of my books (and
anything else having an index section) on Linux machines only.
Another (which I use) is to override the appropriate line in
sub english_titles to become

$idx_title = "Index for this Document";

Since `for' is included (in the same sub) within
$GENERIC_WORDS (i.e., words not to be included in
generated filenames), the Index file becomes
Index_this_Document.html instead of the usual
Index.html.

I moved my HP LaserJet 3380 to the Mac Pro (via USB), and I've
been able to print to it from the Mac environment and from Windows
in VMware, but not consistently. Printing often hangs the printing
app, requiring rebooting (at least rebooting fixed things).

At some point printing stopped working completely from Windows.
It took me a while to figure out that I had to click on one of the
USB icons in the lower-right corner of the screen and explicitly
connect to the local HP Laserjet 3380 on the Mac. Perhaps the
previous item involved some apps being disconnected and others not?

I was able to print from AbiWord (part of GNOME Office)
originally from the Mac, but after installing and updating the HP
software for the 3380, AbiWord now hangs forever when trying to
print. Also, when it did print, the output looked pretty bad (poor
font spacing).

It's also very hard to edit in AbiWord due to layout errors on
the screen, especially when editing. So, for Word-type documents,
I'll either need to run MS Word in VMware, or spring for the Mac
version.

Burning a DVD was surprisingly hard to figure out: It can be
done in the Disk Utility application, but not in the ``obvious
way'' of setting up the source and destination fields and
clicking the ``Burn'' button. Instead, you set up the source
only and click ``Burn'' and it automatically burns to the
``SuperDrive''. Thus, in the Disk Utility, set up the source
field by, e.g., dragging the .iso file from the Finder,
(or select ``File / Open Disk Image'' in its menu and browse to
your .iso image), click the ``Burn'' button, and insert
a blank DVD-R disk if you haven't already.